The Witness When one has been treated maliciously through all one’s life and all this suddenly changes then one might turn vengeful on life and especially the ones that are culpable of the way in which one was formerly maltreated. This characterisation fits properly on Uncle Jimbilly. His mental condition seems rather unstable on the behalf that sudden changes in his mood can and will occur at any time and without warning. These sudden outbursts seem to be a reaction to his suppressed anger towards the white men who molested his kinsmen in a rather gruesome way years ago. As he mentions himself, one of the ways to punish the local Negroes was to lash them until their backs were all bloody and raw. However, as one of the girls asks him: “Did they act like that to you, Uncle Jimbilly?” He admits that that has not been the case. In comparison with the way the white people mistreated the Negroes Uncle Jimbilly now tries to indulge fear by threatening and saying what kind of castigations he would use upon one, they are though only empty threats which mere incline his anger towards white people a couple of generations past. The fact that Uncle Jimbilly in the present carves tombstones for pets is probably something he has made to a life achievement. The tombstones are not carved for the pets but for the Negroes who died by white hands. Referring to the text Uncle Jimbilly declared about his own people: “Of course they died – they died by the thousands and tens upon thousands.” Uncle Jimbilly might therefore want to give to the lot of nameless Negroes at least the small dignity to make them be remembered with a tombstone. The children to whom he hands the tombstones think them to be for dead pets and animals, for which Uncle Jimbilly does not approve the use of them. As one of the children says she would like a tombstone for a rabbit, Uncle Jimbilly refers to the rabbit as a heathen. He simply cannot understand why a heathen rabbit might be worth...